The central figure in many parishes in England is a retired Major-General or Colonel. He constitutes the chief pillar of the neighbouring church, reads the Lessons on Sundays, teaches in the Sunday School, gives away the prizes at School-treats held in his own grounds, and heads every subscription list; while his leisure is given to the compilation of a military memoir or two, and perhaps, if he is very literary, of a few short stories. Just such a man was Xenophon. On retiring from active service, he withdrew to the little village of Skillous in Elis, where he owned a house and a park. The whole country swarmed with fish and game, so that he and his sons could have as much hunting as they pleased. Guests were numerous, for past his gates ran the great high-road from Lakedaimon to Olympia. In his grounds he built a chapel to Artemis, the expenses being defrayed from a tithe of the spoils he had taken in the heart of the Persian Empire. The tenth of the produce of his land was paid to the goddess, and once a year he gave a great sacrificial feast in her honour, to which all the neighbours were invited. In this way the retired General lived for twenty years, devoted to his religion, his hunting, and the composition of his books. Having two sons of his own, he naturally gave some attention to the problems of education. His treatise on the constitution of Lakedaimon is simply a sketch of the Spartan school system, no doubt intended for his boys, who were brought up at Sparta. A curious passage in his _Economics_[716] shows that he considered the most effective mode of teaching to be a series of appeals, by means of question and answer, to personal observation and common-sense. Ischomachos asks Sokrates whether he knows how to plant trees. Sokrates at first replies “No,” but when he is questioned point by point, whether on his excursions to Lukabettos, he has noticed the depth of the trenches in the orchards, and some similar details, and when his common-sense has shown him that plants grow quicker through soft than through hard soil, he finds that he is an expert nurseryman, and decides that questioning must be the way to teach. But the most important of Xenophon’s educational works is the _Education of Kuros_. In this he becomes the classical Miss Edgeworth and Henty combined. The book is really an historical novel, mostly fiction, embodying a moral story for the young, an ideal system of education, and a practical treatise on the whole duty of a general. The ideal system comes first, as a sort of preface, and presents a curious parallel to the rival schemes of his contemporary Plato. Xenophon makes the reader suppose that his system was practised in Persia in the time of Kuros’ boyhood, but there is no authority for his statement. Persia is in this case a convenient title for Utopia.